In winter my mind turns to food, but since I'm interested in art, cooking and looking manage to fill in the cooler months – or maybe that’s all months. I haven’t made hand-made pasta for a while, but I have made sushi and sashimi – though only once in recent memory – as I resurrect all the food traditions I used to observe when I lived in Sydney 25 years ago. Cooking, eating and cruising around art exhibitions – that’s a big part of winter for me.
Cooking minestroneIn the course of my life I have cooked many hundreds of pineapple fruitcakes. It’s a long story. Years ago, after finishing my Master of Arts degree, I found myself working as a wrapping machinist at Arnotts biscuit factory in the heart of the Western suburbs of Adelaide. One of the women I worked with came from country South Australia.
She gave me a recipe for the pineapple fruitcake, which I of course assumed was a traditional recipe from the country – like the South Australian classic, chicken cooked in Coca Cola. The other recipe I was given was for Italian bean soup, but I didn’t make the mistake of assuming that was from country SA.